Was the American Revolution Really a Revolution" essay

Summary for Barbara Clark-Smith, “The Revolution Preserved Social Inequality.”

Barbara Clark-Smith’s article offers a twofold argument that the American Revolution was not, in fact, a revolution.

First, Clark-Smith refutes the argument offered by Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution that the American Revolution created radical change. She does so by noting several weaknesses in his logic. The first of these is the fact that the American Revolution seems highly conservative or limited not only when comparing it to the revolutions of the 20th century, but also to those that occurred in France in the 1790s and in Latin America on the first twenty years of the 1800s. Equally problematic, according to Clark-Smith, is the fact that Wood seems to identify the revolutionary changes brought about by the American Revolution as having occurred both decades before and decades after the actual Revolution itself. That is to say, Wood points to changes occurring in the early 1700s and in the mid-1800s as proof of the radicalism of the American Revolution, which occurred between 1775 and 1800. Third, Clark-Smith points out that the revolution discussed by Wood seems to have been dominated by elite, white males alone. As such, in her opinion, it hardly qualifies as a revolution. Finally, she argues that those aspect of radical change pointed out by Wood appear, to her, to be exaggerated considerably.

Having refuted Wood’s argument about the radical nature of the American Revolution, Clark-Smith briefly offers some points of her own as to why she believes that the American Revolution was not revolutionary. The American Revolution, according to Clark-Smith, failed to change the status of a broad swath of the colonial population, especially those who were most oppressed. The Revolution did not liberate women or do much of anything to strengthen their rights. Similarly, it not only failed to eradicate slavery, it also led to the establishment of a system that allowed the institution of human bondage to grow exponentially. Finally, the Revolution left those who were elites prior to independence in their same positions of status and power, and led to little to no improvement in the lives of poor or working class Americans.